Repo! The Genetic Opera

What do you get when Saw and Willy Wonka have a child, meanwhile Moulin Rouge and The Island have a kid, and somehow those two kids get together and have a baby? You get Repo! The Genetic Opera.

For those who don't know it, it's set in the not-too-distant future during an epidemic of organ failures. GeneCo, headed by Rotti Largo, offers payment plans to those who can't afford transplants. But if you get behind on your payments, Rotti sends his Repo Man after you to "reposess" your transplanted organs.

The story focuses on the life of Shilo Wallace (Alexa Vega), victim of an unspecified blood disease and kept sheltered in her room by her father Nathan (Anthony Head), who has a dangerous secret life. She sneaks out at night to get a glimpse of life, and gets caught up with a Graverobber (Terrence Zdunich) who collects a surgical painkiller called Zydrate from petrified corpses and sells it on the black market. Shilo finds out that Rotti holds a cure for her condition. After being sucked into the haunting world of GeneCo, she is unable to turn back, as all of her questions will be answered at the wildly anticipated spectacular event: The Genetic Opera.

This movie first offers something that we rarely see at the movies anymore: originality. This type of movie doesn't have to make sense in the same way that a traditional film does. It simply has to take you somewhere you have never been, and hopefully throw your mind through a few loops along the way.

There is so much whimsy in this film that it almost becomes an absurdist fairytale. It skips and jumps from one homage to the next, cribbing notes from Rocky Horror in one scene before moving on to Rigoletto in the next. Genres and archetypes are thrown up against one another and mashed together with reckless abandon mixing Grand Guignol with Sondheim and Disney with Faces of Death. It cuts together the pieces of our collective pop culture consciousness the same way that the antagonists cut together new forms for their bodies.

And it's wickedly funny too.

Picking up where the ultimate consumers of Romero's shopping malls left off, Repo! makes for a brutal satire of consumer culture where human flesh is a commodity bought and sold with government approval. People have designer spines and get upgrades on their bodies when they go in for maintenance on their artificial organs. Starlets don't forget to wear panties, they forget to sew on their new faces.

Darren Lynn Bousman has made a name for himself as a go-to guy for over the top, operatic gore and he doesn't shy away from it here. Repo! is often tremendously bloody with sanguine spilling left and right, often directly on top of naked flesh. He takes what he learned making Saw II--IV and pushes in into overdrive as he uses it to skewer one satirical target after the next.

Normally I am one to shy away from sexualized violence. I find it repulsive and saddening, but here, Bousman has found that perfect mix between sexy and grotesque. Though the bloodletting is vicious, it never spills over into elaborate rape fantasy. It is a shame that he is no longer attached to the Hellraiser relaunch.

The cast, made up of a bizarre collection of geek favorites, musicians and world famous opera singers is almost weirder than the movie's central conceit. Paul Sorvino is brilliant fun as the patriarch who controls the world but finds himself unable to defeat cancer. Sorvino is fascinating to watch when he is let loose and he has a singing voice to rival any star of stage. Sarah Brightman is also quite good in a small roll that is entirely divorced from her signature turn in Phantom of the Opera. The rest of the cast is a bit of a mixed bag. Alexa Vega is strong as the cloistered daughter of the eponymous organ ripper and Anthony Stewart Head outdoes his Buffy singing, even as his role is too close to that of Giles, but he's still very good. Meanwhile Bill Mosely is obnoxious and all over the place, playing his seventh version of Chop-top while Paris Hilton is actually shockingly watchable as Amber Sweet, really just a hightened-reality version of herself. But the real standout is Nivek Ogre of Skinny Puppy. The man steals the show as a deformed lothario who has a nasty habit of killing his lovers.

But I really can't do justice explaining it here. You have to see it for yourself.

I give this a WIN for being complerely engaging and original...an instant cult classic.